Hoax Museum Blog: Politics

Election results in Adams County, Colo. have been delayed because of an all write-in race for the county surveyor post, which means every ballot has to be read by a human. They're already reporting a large number of write-in votes for Mickey Mouse and Brad Pitt. [Denver Channel]

Politics are getting ugly in Burnaby, British Columbia. A rumor has been circulating alleging that, if reelected, the party backing the current mayor (pictured) intends to inject children with a "gay serum" that will make them homosexual. The rumor appears to have been inspired by the fact that in 2011 the Burnaby School District adopted a policy to combat homophobia. [Yahoo! News Canada]

The headline of today's Daily Express warned that the EU may ban kettles. Which sounds like something that would strike right at the heart of British culture.
The reality, however, (as pointed out by fullfact.org) is a bit less sensational. An EU commission is investigating the energy consumption of kettles and may, in the future, suggest regulations that would make kettles more energy efficient and improve their impact on the environment.
"Euromyths" (i.e. misleading stories about regulations supposedly dreamed up by overzealous EU bureaucrats) are very popular with the British…

Channel NewsAsia reports on a form of electoral trickery popular in India. In an attempt to confuse voters, rival parties are fielding multiple candidates who have the same name as a more well-known candidate. For instance, "in central Chhatisgarh, incumbent MP Chandulal Sahu of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is running against no less than seven competitors who share his name." So when election day arrives, the voters may not be sure which is the correct Chandulal Sahu to vote for.
Apparently this is a perfectly legal thing to do.

Miscegenation Hoax Anniversary —
Philip Kadish, who's completing his Ph.D. in American Lit. at The City University of New York, notes that a 'neglected anniversary' recently passed by: the 150th anniversary of the Miscegenation Hoax of 1864, which, as he notes, was "one of the greatest and least remembered political media hoaxes in American history."
The old hoax is certainly evidence that bigotry has always been a part of American politics. As Kadish notes, the hoax foreshadowed modern political hoaxes that play to…

Dave Wilson—Not Black —
Dave Wilson insists he didn't get elected to the Houston Community College System Board of Trustees by "pretending to be black," though many people are now accusing him of doing exactly that. He says he merely ran a smart campaign and used "targeted marketing" to appeal to voters in the majority black neighborhood where he was running.
Yes, he avoided putting a photo of his own white face in his campaign literature, but included lots of stock photos of smiling black people. But…

Azerbaijan declares election winner, before election takes place —
The Washington Post reports that the Azerbaijan Central Election Commission accidentally released, via a smartphone app, the results of the country's presidential election a day before the election took place. Oops. The commission is saying that the app's developer accidentally sent out the 2008 election results as a test. But no one is believing this since a) the results show candidates from this year, not 2008; and b) it's Azerbaijan, and everyone assumes the election there is totally…

Too Much Hot Air —
With the government shutting down today, I was reminded of this 1933 April 1st article in the Madison Capitol-Times about their state capitol building exploding because of a buildup of "large quantities of gas, generated through many weeks of verbose debate in the senate and assembly chambers"
I don't think any newspaper would publish a joke like this today, in the post-9/11 era, but it still seems appropriate.

Hoax Caller Imitates Sonia Gandhi —
Indian papers are reporting that the attorney general of India, Goolam Vahanvati, recently received a series of calls from someone claiming to be Sonia Gandhi (President of the Congress), urging him to resign. But it wasn't actually Gandhi on the phone. It was a woman imitating her voice.
Usually it's radio stations that are behind this kind of prank. But in this case, a senior member of the Indian congress is suspected to be the mastermind behind it.
Hoax caller imitates Sonia…

Are the Bush bathroom paintings a hoax? —
A week ago, news broke that a hacker (calling himself 'Guccifer') had broken into George W. Bush's email account. The hacker sent some of the emails and photos he found there to the Smoking Gun, which promptly published them.
Three of the leaked photos showed works of art, apparently by Bush. Two of the works were self-portraits in the bathroom — Bush taking a shower and a bath. The third showed Bush working on a more traditional scene of a seaside chapel.
It's the bathroom…

Did President Taft once get stuck in a bathtub? —
William Howard Taft, 27th President of the United States (1909-1913), was a large man. He reportedly weighed 355 pounds while in office, and according to rumor, he was so large that he once got stuck in the white house bathtub. The experience supposedly so rattled him that he ordered the installation of an extra-large tub big enough to hold four ordinary men.
William Howard Taft
The story of him getting stuck in a tub has been frequently repeated in books and newspapers, but is there…

Mr. Corrupt Self-Serving Lying B’stard —Add this to the satirical candidates file: The guy in the picture was born Eric Mutch. But in 2010 he changed his name by deed poll to "Zero None Of The Above" and ran in the general election for Mayor of Bristol. But he only received 172 votes. He theorized that people didn't understand the point of his name, which was "to give a choice to people who wanted to vote but did not want to give their support to any of the candidates on their ballot paper."
So he's changed his name again.…

This image has been circulating online since February with the caption:
Romney's family misspell their last name in the greatest Freudian slip in history.
The Hill reports that it's fake. However, I don't yet know any further details — such as where the picture was taken. Nor have I seen the original yet.
But I've got to say, assuming this is a fake image, it's a really good one. Both because it's very believable (it's easy to imagine that two kids could momentarily stand in the wrong place), and because it makes its point very clearly: That Romney is incredibly rich, and that he…

Burnt Toast With Image Of Romney Shaking Hands With Satan —
This auction managed to generate some attention from the internet  enough to get it pulled from eBay. Try as anyone might, no one could see the image the seller claimed was there. And the guy wanted $88.40 just for shipping. Apparently the auction was really just a thinly veiled anti-Mormon diatribe. Link: gawker.com.

The 1% Tip Hoax —
Last week an image showing the "tip" left by a rich banker who had dined at a Newport Beach restaurant spread around the internet. The financial tip was slightly less than 1%, on a bill of over $100, but the patron also left a life-advice tip: "GET A REAL JOB".
Naturally, the image provoked the customary rage reaction from netizens.
The image originally was posted on a blog called "Future Ex-Banker" run by an anonymous blogger who said he worked in the corporate office of a bank for…

Mitt Romney and False Memory Syndrome —
Mitt Romney recently displayed an example of what I termed "false memory syndrome" in Hippo Eats Dwarf. It's the tendency of politicians to have memories of events that never happened to them.
In Romney's case, he recently told an audience how he remembered being at Detroit's Automotive Golden Jubilee, in which his dad served as grandmaster. The problem is, the Golden Jubilee took place on June 1, 1946, nine months before Mitt was born. (link: thestar.com)
Other examples of the…

Mitt Romney gets a shoeshine —
In recent days, a photo of Mitt Romney that appears to show him getting a shoe shine as his private jet waits has been spreading around the internet. It's been popular with anyone who doesn't much like Romney because it seems to capture the swanky lifestyle he enjoys as a 0.001 percenter.
But, in reality, this photo is a case of 'real picture, false caption'. The picture dates to 2008 and actually shows Romney sitting for a security check before boarding a plane in Denver, Colorado.…

The Navalny Affair —
Supporters of Vladimir Putin have been caught in a flat-footed attempt at character assassination. Wanting to smear blogger Alexei Navalny, who's been a fierce critic of Putin's government, they created a picture showing Navalny meeting with the exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky. The implication was that Berezovsky was funding Navalny. Then Putin's supporters published the picture in one of the party newspapers.
But the picture was a clumsy fake. The original, undoctored version of the…

Dobrica Cosic Doesn’t Win the Nobel Prize —
Serbian media reported Thursday that one of their own countrymen, writer Dobrica Cosic, had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, he hadn't. Soon after, the Swedish Academy announced the real winner: Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer.
The Serbian media reported Cosic as the winner because they had all received an email, seeming to come from the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, announcing Cosic as the winner. The email linked to a website, nobelprizeliterature.org, that seemed…